Artificial intelligence and machine learning are complex topics, and adding such features to applications has historically required a lot of processing power, not to mention tremendous amounts of learning. The introduction of Microsoft Cognitive Services gives developers the possibility to add these features with ease. It allows us to make smarter and more human-like applications.
This book aims to teach you how to utilize the APIs from Microsoft Cognitive Services. You will learn what each API has to offer and how you can add it to your application. You will see what the different API calls expect in terms of input data and what you can expect in return. Most of the APIs in this book are covered with both theory and practical examples.
This book has been written to help you get started. It focuses on showing how to use Microsoft Cognitive Services, keeping current best practices in mind. It is not intended to show advanced use cases, but to give you a starting point to start playing with the APIs yourself.
This book is for .NET developers with some programming experience. It is assumed that you know how to do basic programming tasks as well as how to navigate in Visual Studio. No prior knowledge of artificial intelligence or machine learning is required to follow this book.
It is beneficial, but not required, to understand how web requests work.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Microsoft Cognitive Services, introduces Microsoft Cognitive Services by describing what it offers and providing some basic examples.
Chapter 2, Analyzing Images to Recognize a Face, covers most of the image APIs, introducing face recognition and identification, image analysis, optical character recognition, and more.
Chapter 3, Analyzing Videos, introduces the Video Indexer API.
Chapter 4, Letting Applications Understand Commands, goes deep into setting up the Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) to allow your application to understand the end users' intentions.
Chapter 5, Speaking with Your Application, dives into different speech APIs, covering text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversions, speaker recognition and identification, and recognizing custom speaking styles and environments.
Chapter 6, Understanding Text, covers a different way to analyze text, utilizing powerful linguistic analysis tools and much more.
Chapter 7, Building Recommendation Systems for Businesses, covers the Recommendation API.
Chapter 8, Querying Structured Data in a Natural Way, deals with the exploration of academic papers and journals. Through this chapter, we look into how to use the Academic API and set up a similar service ourselves.
Chapter 9, Adding Specialized Search, takes a deep dive into the different search APIs from Bing. This includes news, web, image, and video search as well as auto suggestions.
Chapter 10, Connecting the Pieces, ties several APIs together and concludes the book by looking at some natural steps from here.
Appendix A, LUIS Entities, presents a complete list of all pre-built LUIS entities.
Appendix B, License Information, presents relevant license information for all third-party libraries used in the example code.
To follow the examples in this book, you will need Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition or later. You will also need a working internet connection and a subscription to Microsoft Azure; a trial subscriptions is OK too.
To get the full experience of the examples, you should have access to a web camera and have speakers and a microphone connected to the computer; however, neither is mandatory.
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There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. For example; "This can be achieved when we put some content into the DelegateCommand.cs file."
A block of code is set as follows:
private string _filePath; private IFaceServiceClient _faceServiceClient;
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
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private IFaceServiceClient _faceServiceClient;Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, also appear in the text like this. For example: "Open Visual Studio and select File | New | Project."
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